Thursday, June 30, 2011

I guess this is around Christmas 1987. The soap opera Eastenders had a story where Arthur stole money from the Christmas club he ran, and this transgression, and its associated guilt and shame precipitated a nervous breakdown. It was something like a Greek tragedy translated into the simple language of teevee drama. And for this kind of thing it was probably pretty good. But could you imagine television being able to articulate this kind of moral delicacy now? How can you demonstrate social horror attending a minor theft, in a society where the establishment steal with impunity every day, and everyone knows it?

If anything pleases me about the current Tory government, and the same goes for New Labour, it’s that it’s only necessary to recall David Cameron’s Mr Punch wickedness, that appalling creep Philip Hammond, or the wretched Gove, for one's own indiscretions to pale into insignificance.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

I went to this protest in Winchester at the weekend, which was better attended, from what I saw, than the Echo credits; but even so, considering the thousands of people who work for the Council in the South, it was hardly a mass mobilisation. Maybe most people can’t afford to park in Winchester. The speeches made were extremely lucid, and really deserved a bigger audience.